it refrains
from arrogance and from insult, claiming for itself both an honest
freedom of judgment and the right to participate largely in the
bestowment of deserved praise, as well as to maintain a certain
cordiality even in its reservations." "If Diderot was as far as possible
from being a dramatic poet, if he was destitute of that supreme creative
power which involves the transformation of an author's own personality,
he possessed, on the other hand, in the highest degree, that faculty of
demi-metamorphosis which is the exercise and the triumph of criticism,
and which consists in putting one's self in the the place of the author,
occupying the point of view to the subject under examination, and
reading every writing in the spirit by which it was dictated."

Let us admit that these are not so much absolute principles of criticism
as the features which characterize that of the writer himself and the
method which he has almost involuntarily pursued. Let us admit this, and
in doing so we concede to him all the qualities that are rarest and most
desirable in his art,--impartiality, sincerity, disinterestedness;
freedom from theory, from passion, and from prejudice; insight,
comprehension, sensitiveness to every trait and every kind of beauty and
of power; a patient ardor and pure delight in acquisition, and a
generous desire, in the interest of literature itself, to communicate
the results and inspire similar feelings. Without denying that all good
criticism will partake more or less largely of these qualities, or that
some of them have been more abundantly possessed, more profoundly
applied, by others, we believe that it would be difficult to cite an
instance in which they have been so entirely combined or so continuously
exercised. M. Sainte-Beuve is pre-eminently an _artist_ in criticism. He
has exhibited that self-absorption which it is easy to imagine, easy to
find examples of, in poetry, in painting, and in music, but which in
criticism had hitherto been hardly conceivable. "There is in him," wrote
Gustave Planche in 1834,--and the force of the eulogy is in no degree
impaired by subsequent censures from the same quarter,--"a happy
mingling of enthusiasm and curiosity, renewed in proportion as they are
appeased, and enrolled in the service of all nascent or unrecognized
abilities.... He speaks the truth for the sole pleasure of speaking it,
and asks no gratitude either from the disciples whom he initiates or
from the